Earlier this year, Nvidia unveiled a showcase of real-time ray-tracing using Phasma and some Stormtroopers from the Star Wars franchise. At their conference in Gamescom this year, they showcased the same ray-tracing demo - but instead of running off four Volta-powered GPUs, it was powered by a single Turing-powered GPU.

The RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 is only available through the Nvidia website at the time of writing, and will set users back $1899 and $1199 respectively. The RTX 2070, which is available internationally for €569, would retail for $899 through the Nvidia website. Only the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 would be "on-shelf" from September 20; stock of the RTX 2070 is not available at the time of writing.

Update: The site also said there was stock of the RTX 2080 Ti and 2080 available, although the links have since been taken down. An image of the prices from the Nvidia Australian site is reproduced below.

Update #2: NVIDIA just announced prices that were a few hundred dollars cheaper than what was listed on their own website. The RTX listings for the cards have since been taken down.

Update #3: Prices have popped back up on the Nvidia website - very briefly - revealing that the RTX 2070 would sell for $899 locally:

The RTX 2080 Ti, 2080 and 2070 GPUs also ship with a new feature set that includes:

• The NGX neural graphics framework to incorporate AI algorithms into graphics processing
• Variable rate shading to allow shaders to concentrate GPU processing power into the most demanding areas of an image, rather than having to spread GPU power evenly across an entire screen if not needed
• GDDR6 memory
• 13-blade dual axial fans on the Founders' Edition cards for 3x the airflow
• USB Type-C and VirtualLink support
• Tensor Cores for deep neural network processing

Here's the RTX 2080 Ti, compared with the non-Founders Edition of the card and the GTX 1080 Ti:

And the specs for the RTX 2080 Founders Edition and non-Founders:

Here's the RTX 2070 Founders Edition and reference card specs. Note that the RTX 2070 only requires a single 8-pin connector, and has a noticeably lower TDP than the other two cards.

Nvidia CEO Jen Hsun Huang said the GPUs were designed for "maximum overclocking". The RTX 2080 Ti would ship with 11GB of memory, and have 78 trillion RTX-OPS and 10 Giga Rays/s of performance.

The presentation was punctuated with a host of detailed explanations about different lighting techniques, real-time ray tracing, and other rendering techniques. It was a lead-up to talk about the technologies powering the company's new series of GPUs, which were leaked by AIB partners and retailers beforehand.

Various AIB cards, shown off by Newegg.

A large part of the reveal involved discussion of new technologies and interfaces, including DLSS, which enables a new form of anti-aliasing that's more accurate than temporal anti-aliasing.

Nvidia also showed off the Unreal Engine Infiltrator demo running at 60 FPS, although Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang noted that it could run the demo at 72 FPS (but the screen was locked to 60 FPS). A GTX 1080 Ti, Huang noted, could only run the Infiltrator demo at approximately 30 FPS.

In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, for instance, an early sequence of the game takes Lara through a town square as she follows a couple of enemies. The demo showcased the difference in how colour blends with shadows with RTX enabled, and how the hard shadows collide when disabled.

I thought $1200(+) was kind of steep for a GTX1080Ti (what is now the price for a standard 2080), but this is something else entirely! GPU pricing is getting out of control.

Ray tracing or no ray tracing, I don't think I could justify spending that kind of money on a graphics card that will be -- more than likely -- semi-obsolete in a couple of years time. I could spend that much on a TV, but I would expect it to last me at least six or seven years.

It will be interesting to see actual rasterised performance against the 'current' generation. Ray tracing might be pretty impressive tech, but realistically it's going to be entering it's infancy during the span of Turing's lifetime. Pure performance has to be there as well.

Seeing how nicely my gtx 1080 runs current gen games, i'm more interested in this to see how pricing in general reacts. I'll be building a new pc within the next 2 yrs so it's going to be an exciting time. You're right that those prices are really, really high. But they will come down eventually.

The price creep has been going on for a few years now but this is the most blatant example of it. The cards are amazing (at least theoretically) but when they cost more than the entire rest of the PC it's getting ridiculous.

That said, I'll wait and see how pricing looks from Asus/Gainward/Gigabye etc in a few months. If the 2070 isn't more like $600 AU I guess I'll be skipping a generation.

I'm sure the current graphics tech will bench just fine. There are already some leaked benches that look legit showing the cards perform better than existing ones in 3dMark and Ashes of the Singularity. But yeah, with that price hike they really need to perform 75% faster not just 10% or 25%...

Or, maybe, we're approaching a point in time where people don't "need" to buy the most expensive card to play COD, LoL, or PUBG on a 1080p monitor.

Specifically, the only 4k monitor I am aware of that even does > 60hz, the Asus PG27UQ, already costs twice as much as the launch RRP of the founder's edition of the 2080ti.

Complaining that this card exists when it isn't for you, is like complaining that Titans or Quadros or Bugatti Veyrons exist. It only highlights your envy.

As a system builder, it's your responsibility to define your requirements; one of the best things about this launch is that if your requirements stayed the same, then the used market just got cheaper to meet them.

Mine involve improving visibility and reducing shimmer of distant objects on a virtual race track. I will probably buy one of these and hate myself for it. But if I price it at a 50% price hike over a 1080ti for a 30% framerate benefit, it certainly looks like a realistic product, unlike, say, the Titan V or stamping my feet and saying that it needs to be 75% faster.

I suspect that Tesla/Uber/whoever else is building self-driving cars will probably buy these instead of Titan V's to steer their vehicles as well, and be thankful that such a product exists.

Those price rises are brutal and they cover all the cards announced so far. If the pricing trend continues we could be seeing a 2060 priced at somewhere between $349 and $399 and a 2050 somewhere between $199 and $249.

Sure the performance is improving but there are no low-mid range performing cards priced decently. It used to be just the halo cards (the xx80 or Ti series) that were ridiculously expensive, now they all are.

As for the gaming monitors, 4k 60Hz monitors are reasonably cheap (can be had around the $500 mark). I should know, I have one and have had for several years. The problem is there are already reports that the RTX2080 is seeing framerate drops below 60fps in RTX game demos at 1080p. So forget powering your 120 or 144Hz 4k monitor with one anyway.

Jesus, I'd love to build a new rig, but I'd have to see benchmarks before dropping cash like that. The 2070 seems like the more reasonable proposition depending on how it runs but that's the bulk of a new system right there.

The x70 series has been my go to for the last three graphics cards. The true high end got too expensive about three generations ago and it's just getting worse. Sadly, looking at these prices even the 2070 is creeping out of my price range :(

Agreed. Bitcoin hasn't been efficient to mine with GPUs for some time (miners use specialised ASICs these days), and the other major cryptocurrency (Ethereum) is about to move away from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, which doesn't require hours of hashing to mine. Buying $2k GPUs for mining right now isn't nearly as good an investment as it once was.

$900 for a 2070? Nevermind the 2080 and the ti, this is just getting out of hand now. I bought a premium GTX 580 for around $600 about 7 yrs ago,, there go my dreams of owning a 2080 at more than 3 times that cost!! These gpus would effectively double the price of building a new gaming PC. I think most gamers are going to wait for a 1060 and see how it benches at 1440p 144hz which is what most gamers are using or would likely upgrade to from 1080p anyway.

I don't think ray tracing is going to be worth that horrendouscost to most gamers. Here is man it's insane!

This has to be a conspiracy from the console makers to steer kids away from PC gaming. I mean come on. If ray tracing costs this much man I don't want it, just give me more smooth fps.

Jeez talk about prohibitively expensive. There's no way I'll be buying a 2080, let alone a 2080 TI. Even the asking price for a 2070 feels insultingly huge. The worst part is the GTX 590 I had a few years back was cheaper than the 2080 and that was more or less the "Titan" of the 500 series.

I suddenly feel inclined to pick up a ~$700 1080 from umart and skip this generation entirely. Guess I'll have to wait for some benchmarks/reviews though to see if those prices are at all justified.

That will be a possibility but it's going to depend on just how fast they are compared to a 1080 and whether they do actually get that low in cost. All I can do right now is wait and see but pretty much all of my disposable money is going to dry up by the end of the year so I've got only a few months to pick something... or I'll be struggling with my GTX 970 for a good while longer.

I might be alone here, but having watched Huang's keynote speech this week I think what these cards are capable of justifies the stupid pricing. No one is forcing anyone to buy one the day they come out, and your 1080s will still kick arse for a few more years yet.

But this isn't just an upgraded card pushing more triangles around a bit faster than the previous model, which is probably why they didn't just call it a GTX 1180. The RTX offers a feature set that could deliver Hollywood style graphics in gaming within the next 5 to 10 years, which is worth getting excited about.

I don't think anything could justify almost $2,000 for a graphics card that will only be in it's prime for a few years (and lets face it, the 2080 and the 2070 are just going to look weak next the Ti, especially now it's not a staggered release). If the tech didn't become obsolete so quickly, then there might be *some* merit to what you're saying ... but when a single graphics card starts to reach the cost of what you used to be able to build an entire system for (not the best, but still pretty impressive), then you know there is a problem.

The problem is how good the low end is now. You can pick up a Ryzen 2400G and play pretty much anything you want without even buying a graphics card. The GTX 1060 was already mostly overpowered for 1080p gaming, with the GTX 1070 doing the same for 1440p. If the early benchmarks are correct, the RTX 2070 will perform nearly perfectly at 2160p, previously the domain of the GTX 1080 Ti.

What I think has happened here isn't that Nvidia has just bumped prices (they have a little, don't get me wrong), what's really happened is Nvidia have renamed the GTX X80 Ti model as the RTX X70, and then added two whole new tiers of performance that go well beyond what we have ever seen before.

I think it really depends on what kind of system builder you are and how much you value graphics (in gaming).

if you refresh your entire PC every 2 years then I can see there's very little justification to spend thousand(s) of dollars but if you're just swapping parts out incrementally then spending a grand on a card isn't such a bad idea. I mean if the card going to last you (say) 5 years or you're going from a 980TI to a RTX 2080 TI then it might be worth it (benchmarks and reviews depending)

I've been warning people of this GPU price creep for some time, and not just because of cryto, mostly due to lack of competition probably.
Anyway people mocked me for it! lol, bet their feeling real stupid now but!

People should put their thinking caps on before buying these ultra priced cards, and take note that the next gen consoles are not far away and will be powerhouses if rumor mill is correct, for less then a 2070, you might be able to get a XBOX2 or PS5 that performs way better.. keep that in mind!

Holy moly.
At times i have seen GTX 1080ti's down to almost the price of that RTX 1070. (which is extra bad because Ti is supposed to be the shitty cost to performance and the XX70 is supposed to be the king of price to performance)
I have seen GTX 1080s for below $650.
I have seen GTX 1070s down to $470
And those were like half a year or so after they came out (so nearly a year and a half ago), not even some end of life sale.
This isn't just price creep, they have almost doubled in price at all points.
(OK, these cards will get sales in 6 months too i guess so its not quite double, but even with those sales prices will be like 60% higher at each point)

And from how silent they were on regular game comparisons plus the fact that the amount of cores and boost clocks are basically unchanged from last gen it doesn't even seem there will be a big performance jump in regular games (you know, what 99% of games will still be for the next 4 years).
Fortunately i have a GTX 1080 i got for $500 through a happy set of circumstances but i was hoping to upgrade to a 2080 or Ti with not a too crazy amount of extra to pay after selling my 1080 (need it for Pimax 8k VR headset). But i am almost 100% likely skipping this gen and waiting for the RTX 3080 (or will it be a 2180?) or hopefully something from AMD.

You've actually reminded me of the last time I bought a AMD/ATI card. It was just after the 400 series Geforces came out I believe. I was almost as hyped up for those as I was for these RTX cards, but when the reviews started to trickle out.... they were disappointingly hot, power-hungry, expensive and only slightly better than AMD's offering.

I wonder what the chances are that history will repeat itself... maybe I'll start paying attention to the next-gen AMD cards while I wait for the RTX 2070 to become more widely available (and reviewed)

Sadly it doesn't seem like AMD has anything to release to capitalise on this (seeming) screw up from nvidia. From most rumors/info the next cards they release are gonna be mid next year at best and possibly only be midrange, with high end possibly late 2019 or even 2020, which by then nvidia will likely be releasing their next gen high end.

"As soon as NVIDIA revealed its new RTX graphics cards, we’ve been wondering whether real-time ray tracing would be worth the performance hit or not. And it appears that its high-end GPU that will cost $1300 is unable to run Shadow of the Tomb Raider with RTX On at 1080p and with 60fps" - Das hardware -

Can't run 1080P 60fps..... with almost $2000 of graphics card using ray trace.....
Well that is a joke....

Triple AAA games nailing the brief. Indie games surprising people out of nowhere, and expansions and patches that completely turn a game around. It's been a good year for games - now it's time for you to vote for your favourite.